The noise is gone. The distractions are few. The clumsy subplots have been
removed, along with all the clever workings of style, the character nuance, the
labyrinths of plot, the romance, the tension.

This is how Jim Jarmusch does a Hitman Movie - he strips it of all its substance
and reveals only the artifice. Or, perhaps he's arguing that substance so often is
the artifice?

This is a movie completely broken down to its
component parts. It is "about" an unnamed hitman (Isaach De Bankole) and plays
out like a metaphysical revenge fantasy gutted of all detail. We see essentially the
same exact scene over and over and over - he meets another unnamed person who
strikes up a virtually identical "conversation" as the last, with only the nouns (art,
film, music, science) replaced. They exchange matchboxes. The note inside the
box the Lone Man receives always contains an unintelligible code, and he always
swallows it.

The man's lifestyle is as austere as possible - no sex, no guns, no mobile phones,
hardly any talking and one suitcase's worth of clothes. From time to time he visits
the art gallery, waits until he finds inspiration (or understanding?) from a particular
painting, then leaves. The paintings, the characters he meets and the objects they
possess all seem to be intertwined, but of course only in an artificial way.

What we realize when observing this relentless monotony is that these characters
are following all the same steps you'd find in a standard mystery. Characters
exchange information, the plot moves forward - it doesn't matter what the
information is, only that it has been exchanged.

In between, our hero might have a dalliance with a
woman, meet people, engage in conversation, spend a night in the city - all such
scenes are present in The Limits of Control, but reduced to empty surface value and
overt symbolism. It's all there to move things from one scene to the next. Any
movie with a similar plot goes through all the same motions to get to the same
place; the rest is just filler, right? This movie is like an X-ray of cinematic
structure. Those other movies just happen to be more entertaining than this one.

Jarmusch has done so much on a minimal scale that perhaps this movie shouldn't
come as a surprise. His style has always been distinctive but simple, utilizing
minimal camerawork, minimal budgets and even minimal color (several of his best
films were shot in black and white). Perhaps, with this one, he was testing the
limits of his own control as a filmmaker. How much could he strip this story down
and get away with it? All the way to the bone?

Seen as a Brechtian gesture, The Limits of Control can be appreciated as an
experiment. But it's hard to appreciate it as anything else. The style of the film
wears off once we see what it's doing. There are references and hints that conjure
further interpretations that might theoretically be worth exploring - but then again,
since Jarmusch is giving us so little, what obligation do we have to dig into any of
it?

Especially since the audience is ultimately subjected
to some rather clumsy political symbolism at the end that may offer an alternate
(and decidedly less interesting) window into the movie's ideas.

Maybe I'd like to decipher the exact relationship between the artwork we see in the
film and the characters the Lone Man encounters. Maybe I'd like to wonder about
the relationship between imagination and reality. Maybe I'd like to examine De
Bankole's face and keep trying to decide whether he's telling us that everything is
all part of the plan, or that it's all serendipitous. Right now, I'm torn.

But when it comes down to it, Jarmusch has done such a thorough job stripping the
film of any sense of wonder or imagination, it's pretty hard to give it much thought
at all. After all, he's spent the last two hours showing us exactly how artificial his
movie is. Consider the lesson learned.